Search API over Brave's independent index, with an LLM endpoint
Each tool is evaluated against our methodology using public docs, vendor demos, and hands-on testing.
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What is Brave Search API?
Brave Search API is a paid API from Brave Software that gives programmatic access to Brave's own web index, which Brave says covers more than 30 billion pages with over 100 million page updates a day. It has separate endpoints for web, image, video, and news search, plus suggestions, spell-check, and an "LLM context" endpoint built for RAG and agent workflows; Search Goggles are also available for custom result reranking. The service is SOC 2 Type II attested, has optional Zero Data Retention for enterprise customers, and Brave says AWS, Shopify, Cohere, and Mistral AI use it.
Our verdict
This suits teams that want a search index outside the Google/Bing duopoly for RAG or agent tooling, especially with the dedicated LLM endpoint and enterprise-grade data-retention options. It is a hosted API only, with no self-hosting path and no independent figures on index coverage or freshness beyond Brave's own claims.
Categories:
SERP APIs run queries against Google and other engines and return parsed results: organic listings, ads, snippets, and local packs. They handle the proxies and parsing that make search scraping brittle, and are used for rank tracking, SEO tooling, and market research.
JSON API for scraping Google and 50+ other search engines
Freemium·Jul 2026·SERP APIs
Google Search API with structured JSON results in 1-2 seconds
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Pay-as-you-go REST APIs for SERP, keyword, and backlink data
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How Brave Search API compares
SerpApiSerpApi is a paid SERP API that scrapes Google and other engines; it competes directly with Brave's own-index approach for programmatic search access.
SerperSerper is a lower-cost Google SERP API, an option for teams that want Google-specific results rather than Brave's independent index.
DataForSEODataForSEO has a broader set of SERP and SEO data APIs spanning multiple search engines; it competes on breadth of data types rather than index independence.
